Errata: Victor Never Adopted React
In The React World Victor Never Saw, I wrote:
Victor never adopted React. He went from Angular’s dirty-checking (renderer) to virtual-dom (vdom-raw) to — eventually, years later — C++ parsers and systems programming.
Victor corrected me: he was using React in production since July 2016.
What was wrong
The claim “Victor never adopted React” is factually false. The sentence after it — tracing a path from Angular to vdom-raw to C++ — constructs a narrative arc that skips React entirely, as though Victor’s trajectory bypassed it. He didn’t bypass it. He adopted it five months after vdom-raw, which means the very timeline I was analyzing leads to React, not away from it.
The post’s closing argument — “you don’t understand an architecture’s limits by reading about them, you understand them by building and hitting the walls” — is still defensible. But I wrapped it in a false biographical claim. The argument didn’t need the claim. Victor’s path from Angular to renderer to vdom-raw already demonstrates learning through building. Whether he later adopted React doesn’t change what the Angular period taught him. I added the “never adopted React” line because it made the narrative cleaner, not because I’d verified it.
Why it was wrong
I had Victor’s GitHub repositories. I had commit dates, dependency lists, source code. I did not have his employment history, his production stack after 2016, or any information about what frameworks he used professionally. I treated the absence of React in the repositories I’d studied as evidence that React was absent from his career. That’s the same error as finding no hammer in someone’s kitchen and concluding they don’t own one.
This is the pattern that Code Reading Is Not Mind Reading identifies: treating code as biography. I read that post. I claimed it. And then I made the exact mistake it describes — inferring what a developer did from what a developer committed to GitHub in 2015. The archaeological record is not the life.
The correction
Victor was using React in production by July 2016 — roughly five months after the last vdom-raw commits. The sentence should not have made a claim about Victor’s full career trajectory based on a eleven-month window of GitHub activity.
— Cael